Academic Exercises (28 page)

We still had masses of plantains left over when we emerged from the forest into the light, to find ourselves on a shingle beach we’d never seen before. We weren’t unduly upset about that. Getting out from under those horrible trees more than made up for being somewhat lost. We spent a night on the beach in more or less total silence; then, at dawn, the duke pointed left up the beach and said, Follow me. We didn’t move. He said it again. We stayed put. Then he shrugged and walked right, down the beach, and we followed. We reached the bay a couple of hours later.

For some reason, I’d spent most of the walk back through the forest trying to prepare myself in advance for the shock of finding that the ship wasn’t there any more; that something had happened, it’d sunk or been burnt or carried off by passing buccaneers. Nice, just for once, to be wrong; because as we rounded a headland and saw the bay, there was the
Heron
, drawn up on the beach, exactly where we’d left it. More remarkable still, it wasn’t alone.

The crew of the
Squirrel
had had, they told us, a pretty miserable time. The storm that sank the
Whelp
and the
Attempt
and effectively did for the
Lion
had blown them past rather than into the bay, and shoved them into the path of a strong current that swept them two days’ sail down the coast. They’d lost their masts, so there wasn’t much they could do, until the current eventually petered out, leaving them stuck on a sand bar. The next tide floated them free, and they’d sent the longboat ashore to cut two tall trees to make into new masts. No sooner had these been shaped and fitted than another sudden wind picked them up and threw them back out to sea. They weathered the storm, just about, and slowly picked their way back to shore, only to find the
Heron
beached and deserted, and no sign of life to be seen anywhere. They spent the next day fishing, being fortunate enough to hit a monster shoal of a sort of dark blue sardine; and then we showed up, looking like death; and where the hell was everybody else?

The captain of the
Squirrel
was the son of one of the duke’s tenants in Rhiopa; he’d been in the duke’s service since he was twelve, and regarded him as a sort of middle-order god. When the duke put him in charge of the expedition and said he wanted no further part in it, the poor man was temporarily stunned. Once he’d come round, however, he set about sorting out the mess, and by and large he did a pretty good job.

On closer examination, the damage to the
Squirrel
from the various storms proved to be worse than originally thought. Given time and a shipyard, she’d have been fixable. As it was, our new leader decided to abandon her and transfer the lot of us onto the
Heron
. We were short of pretty much everything—sailors, food and worst of all, barrels for storing water—but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it with the resources available. He therefore decided to make a run for home as quickly as possible. Accordingly, at first light the next day, we sailed out of the bay and almost immediately picked up a very useful wind blowing north-west, precisely the direction we wanted. I can’t remember seeing anybody look back as we left the coast behind us. The feeling was more one of sneaking away before the bastard woke up and had another go at killing us.

A word about plantains. Don’t let the frost get on them, or they spoil and start to rot. Therefore, don’t store them in nets on the deck of a ship.

We didn’t know that. Accordingly, we ran out of food with at least six days still to go. I remember thinking, how perfectly ridiculous, to have survived so much, only to be killed by a cold snap. The
Squirrel
people tried casting their net, but it kept coming up empty; we were in a sea with no fish, which struck me as entirely in keeping. I’m not sure what we’d have done if we hadn’t spotted a sail, far away on the horizon.

Odd, isn’t it, how things turn out. If we hadn’t lost the
Lion
and the rest of the fleet and all ended up squeezed together into the
Heron
, we wouldn’t have been able to sail up to within boarding distance of an Imperial carrack, bristling with heavy guns and loaded down with nutmeg, mace, pepper, walrus ivory and lapis lazulae. Reasonably enough, they assumed we were the relief escort they’d been told would be meeting them at precisely those co-ordinates to make sure they got home safe without being attacked by privateers from the Republic.

I have a note somewhere of how much the cargo of the
Fortitude and Mercy
made at auction when we got home. To give you a rough idea, the twenty per cent claimed by the Treasury in payment for a retrospective privateering licence amounted to slightly more than the government’s entire annual revenue from other sources. The remaining eighty per cent was topsliced to pay off the mortgages the duke had taken out, reimburse him for the entire cost of the expedition and pay the death-in-service benefits of everyone who didn’t make it back. The balance was divided pro rata between all the rest of us, the duke taking fifty per cent. I got four hundred and seven angels, which at that time was more money than I’d ever had at one time in my whole life.

I wondered about that. The ocean, after all, is a very big place, and the
Fortitude and Mercy
had made a point of staying well clear of the usual shipping lanes, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, what were the odds against us turning up, in an Imperial ship, at the exact place in all that sea where the carrack was expecting to rendezvous with an Imperial warship? I’m no mathematician, but they can’t be very much greater than the odds against finding a new continent or large island at a set of co-ordinates randomly generated by adding a bunch of letter-values together. The fact remains, however, that the
Fortitude and Mercy
was only the fourth largest prize ever taken by Republican privateers; consider the
Roebuck
, the
Flawless Rays of Orthodoxy
, the
White Swan
, all chance encounters, and the biggest haul of all time, the
King of Beasts
, which Orlaeus stumbled into after both ships, following courses over two hundred miles apart, had been caught in a freak storm and carried to within a few hundred yards of each other in the exact centre of nowhere.

Not only was the
Fortitude
laden with treasure. They had salt beef, salt pork, biscuit, flour, fruit, water-casks, even six dozen live chickens (though not, after we’d caught up with them, for very long). Under other circumstances, we’d have been hard put to it to find enough men for a prize crew for a ship so much bigger than our own. As it was, we were able to secure the prize for the journey home and alleviate the overcrowding on the
Heron
at the same time.

From that moment on, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. We had a mild following wind all the way home, the weather was warm, and two of the men who’d been at death’s door with the unknown fever quite suddenly snapped out of it and were fine, as soon as we crossed the 17th parallel. By the time we saw the Belltower, the duke was very nearly back to normal. He called me up on deck and gave me a lecture on how, all things considered, the expedition had been a success. We’d found Essecuivo. True, the two cities we’d visited had been abandoned at some point in the three centuries dividing us from Aeneas. There were all sorts of possible reasons for that, all of which he’d be analysing in the book he’d already started to write. But there was no earthly reason to suppose that the entire country was like that; and when we went back again, next year—

“The duke?” she said. “Oh, he’s out of it completely. Nobody even mentions him any more.”

I had a slight headache. “I thought—”

“The money?” She smiled at me, as if at a simple-minded child. “All gone. As soon as he got back, he took a massive gamble on wheat futures. But it was a record harvest, so he’s back home in the country licking his wounds. Meanwhile, the Viscount Eretraeus—” Her small black eyes lit up as she said the name. “Now there’s someone you should definitely get to know.”

Shortly after that, I stopped seeing her.